No "good morning" and "good afternoon" in Romance Languages?
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From François Lang:
I hope this isn't a well-known question. I searched LL for
"good morning" romance
and found nothing. So here goes.
(1) One can say "good evening" idiomatically in Romance languages, but not "good morning" or "good afternoon".
(2) However, all three are idiomatic in Germanic languages.
I'm wondering if LL readers concur, and, if so, have any explanations of these two points.
Just kidding here, but maybe the Whorfians would suggest that the passage of (day) time in southern Europe is more fluid?
I don't know about this. I think that I was taught to say "bon matin" in high school French a long time ago.
Selected readings
- "'Good morning' considered dangerous" (10/24/17)
- "Why plural days and nights in Spanish greetings?" (4/29/13)
- "Sinographically transcribed English" (12/26/10)
- "Transcriptional Chinese animal imagery for English daily greetings" (3/13/23)
- "'Have a good day!' in Mandarin" (9/5/12)
- "Sinographically transcribed English" (12/26/10)
- Mary S. Erbaugh: "China expands its courtesy: Saying 'Hello' to Strangers," The Journal of Asian Studies, 67.2 (May, 2008),621-652.
Andrea Mazzucchi said,
July 17, 2024 @ 9:11 am
In Italian there are
buon giorno/buongiorno (good morning)
buon pomeriggio (good afternoon)
buona sera/buonasera (good evening)
buona notte/buonanotte(good night)
Funny idioms:
"buongiorno e buonasera": a superficial acquaitance
"buonanotte": can be used to express frustration/resignation
DJL said,
July 17, 2024 @ 9:24 am
I don’t want to be thick, and I may be missing something here, but this claim is nonsense, isn’t it? Can we have some examples from Germanic languages and the source of the claim for clarification?
I mean, buon giorno, buon pomeriggio, etc etc is that the point?
Ryan said,
July 17, 2024 @ 10:21 am
I’m sure the point is that giorno, lime jour or diss, doesn’t correspond to morning, and in my experience can be used after noon.
cameron said,
July 17, 2024 @ 10:22 am
I think "bon matin" is still idiomatic in Quebec French. I think in France it'd be considered a bit off, but certainly not completely bizarre or incomprehensible.
Ryan said,
July 17, 2024 @ 10:23 am
tried to type like and dias. Phone keyboards!
Coby said,
July 17, 2024 @ 10:39 am
Spanish has no "good evening" because it has no word for "evening" comparable to French soir or Italian sera, only the compound tarde-noche. One normally says buenas tardes before sunset and buenas noches after.
Catalan, however, has bon matí and (at least in Valencian) bon vespre.
VVOV said,
July 17, 2024 @ 10:45 am
At least in my experience (not a native Spanish speaker), "buenos días" is almost exclusively used in the morning. There's "buenas tardes" for the afternoon.
Is the claim in the OP that Romance languages don't have a salutation that combines the direct translation-equivalents of the English words "good" and "morning"? If so, that's true of Spanish (*buena mañana), but I would argue that the most apt English translation of "buenos días" is "good morning".
Chris Button said,
July 17, 2024 @ 10:48 am
Boa tarde!
J.W. Brewer said,
July 17, 2024 @ 10:49 am
My German is very rusty, but the claim that "good afternoon" is idiomatic in modern German sounded wrong to me and the first bit of usage-guidance I googled up (worth what you pay for it) confirmed that '"Guten Nachmittag" ist nicht üblich – verwende stattdessen "Guten Tag".'
And "good day" is not idiomatic *as a greeting* in current AmEng the way "good morning" or "good afternoon" are. Stereotypically, it is said with cold or hostile implications by someone trying to terminate a conversation/encounter, with "Good day to you, Sir" meaning more or less "now get the hell out of my face" in a more formal register. In a more friendly tone, one typically hears "have a good day" (or "a good one") at the end of an encounter rather than its beginning.
BZ said,
July 17, 2024 @ 11:09 am
I guess it depends on how loosely you're willing to translate "afternoon". For example, in Russian (which isn't a Romance or Germanic language, but never mind that), you use the same word for "day" and "afternoon" (день), but they are two different senses of the word, so I would argue that Russian has an equivalent to "good afternoon" (добрый день) because it can only be used in the afternoon.
Victor Mair said,
July 17, 2024 @ 11:17 am
For sinographically transcribed English "good morning" — at least two different ways — see this post.
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2864
Victor Mair said,
July 17, 2024 @ 11:28 am
One of the favorite things of my childhood radio days: Paul Harvey — Good Day!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiZi91a3ABw
DJL said,
July 17, 2024 @ 12:30 pm
@Ryan, I see! I was being thick.
In that case, then, Italian does also have
buona mattinata (good morning)
which even though it is not very common, it certainly exists (my mum was very keen on it).
@Coby the RAE has Spanish 'tarde' as a word that refers to afternoon (at least to the period between midday and dusk):
https://dle.rae.es/tarde?m=form
Cervantes said,
July 17, 2024 @ 12:40 pm
Yes, it's just that the exact divisions of the day to which the idiomatic expressions refer don't line up exactly. Buenos dias literally means "good days" (why it's plural is the more interesting question) but it is normally said in the morning. I don't know that people are necessarily sticklers about making the changeover to buenas tardes at exactly noon, or to buenos noches exactly at sunset, but that's basically what they mean. Perhaps people don't say "buenas mañanas" because it would be ambiguous. Mañana means tomorrow as well as morning, as I think most English speakers know. I suppose I could say "Buenas mañanas" to mean "have a good life." Anyway, the claim made by Mr. Lang is absurd.
Eric said,
July 17, 2024 @ 12:46 pm
I'm a French native speaker. We don't say "bon matin" anymore, it's archaic. We use "bonjour" during the day, "bonsoir" in the evening. "Bon après-midi" is used in the afternoon only when leaving, as is "bonne nuit" when retiring.
Then there's the more idiomoatic "salut" which works for greeting, leaving, at any time.
David Marjanović said,
July 17, 2024 @ 1:00 pm
I haven't encountered "good afternoon" anywhere in German, and I'm a native speaker.
On top of that, formal greetings aren't everywhere based on the time of day. In Austria, to people you're on a last-name basis with, pretty much your only option is Grüß Gott.
Daniel Barkalow said,
July 17, 2024 @ 1:25 pm
Here's a Monty Python sketch involving the English idiom "good morning" and its usage, with subtitles in a romance language:
https://youtu.be/zP0sqRMzkwo?t=32
The translation clearly literally means "good day", but I'm not sure whether the objection that the greeting is inappropriate in the afternoon is true in translation, particularly with the later implication that it's definitely too early for "good evening"
Hans Adler said,
July 17, 2024 @ 1:36 pm
As another native German speaker I can confirm that there is no equivalent of "good afternoon" in German. And I have an intuition that there never was, at least in the standard language.
However, it appears that ALL other modern Germanic languages except Icelandic either have an exact equivalent of "good afternoon" or use a phrase that literally (or at least etymologically) translates to "good noon" in this way. I checked even for Afrikaans, Faroese, Frisian, Luxembourgish and Yiddish. (These checks were very superficial, so I may be wrong for a few languages.)
Icelandic is well known to be the most conservative modern Germanic language. Standard German, due to how it was created and the role it plays relative to German dialects, is probably the second most conservative one. I guess this, like my intuition, points to "good noon" and "good afternoon" being relatively late innovations. (Of course these claims could be easily falsified by finding "good afternoon" in, say, Anglo-Saxon.)
An innovation with a similar meaning is currently arising in Standard German. In work contexts, and in work contexts only, in recent decades "Mahlzeit!" (literal meaning "mealtime", but originally used as "enjoy your meal!") has become a universal greeting around noon. It doesn't seem unlikely that in a few more decades from now this will take over from "Guten Tag" at noon and then, as happened to "good noon" in various other Germanic languages, gradually be generalized to apply during the afternoon as well.
Regarding explanations for these differences: I think these are just random variations. Having different greetings for different times of the day serves no real purpose (except to establish temporal context unobtrusively in a literal text). As the example of "Mahlzeit" shows, variations can come up simply as random restricted fashions, and then spread. (The reason "Mahlzeit" is popular as a greeting in a work context is the conspiratorial insinuation: "We shouldn't still be here, working. We should be sitting in the lunchroom, eating.")
Chris Butto said,
July 17, 2024 @ 1:42 pm
Yet it's singular in Portuguese "bom dia", and also in "boa tarde" (good afternoon) and "boa noite" (good night).
JimG said,
July 17, 2024 @ 1:53 pm
I sometimes wondered whether greetings and salutations, expressions of gratitude, references to time and weather, and some other formulae might have been rooted in religion, religious movements and belief structures. Examples include inclusions or reference to deities, e.g.
God bless you (after a sneeze)
the Good Lord willing and the creek don't rise (for hopes)
(God's) grace/blessing/mercy (for gratitude, vs personal thanks)
Exclamatory profanities that refer to deities
J.W. Brewer said,
July 17, 2024 @ 1:55 pm
Note that in the Paul Harvey clip (or compilation of clips) posted by vhm he uses "Good Day!" as a sign-off, albeit a friendly one, but uses "Good Morning" as his opener. That fits a somewhat more generous account of the facts of current-ish* AmEng usage than what I offered above.
*Harvey was born in 1918 – closer in age to (3/4 of) my grandparents than to my parents, and his usage of the "Good Day!" sign off may have been more common for his cohort than it is now in mine.
KevinM said,
July 17, 2024 @ 2:29 pm
What, no Sapir-Whorf jokes?
Benjamin E. Orsatti said,
July 17, 2024 @ 2:35 pm
KevinM,
Hmm. Now that you mention it, why is it necessary to refer at all to the time of day when greeting or parting from someone at all? Why doesn't every language just have varying registers of formality for "hello" and "goodbye"?
What does identifying the sun's position in the sky at that particular moment have to do with the price of tea in China, Prof. Mair?
Y said,
July 17, 2024 @ 2:48 pm
There are two different pragmatic circumstances at hand. In English, for example, "Good night" is used as a sign off, wishing well to one who is going to sleep. "Good evening", "Good afternoon", and the obsolescent "Good day" are greetings which acknowledge the time of day of the locution. "Good morning" is in-between: it is used to greet someone who has (presumably) recently woken up, and also, variably, as a general greeting in the earlier part of the A.M.
Other languages, I assume, attach different meanings to their greetings.
Victor Mair said,
July 17, 2024 @ 2:57 pm
Benjamin E.,
Well, if you believe that the position of the planets and the time of the day influence your mood and feelings, then it matters a lot whether it's morning, noon, afternoon, evening, or night.
Some people are very grumpy in the morning, and when you wish them "good morning", you sincerely hope that they will become happier anon, with or without the obligatory coffee (tea for the people who run out of steam in the afternoon).
Victor Mair said,
July 17, 2024 @ 3:18 pm
BTW, I often say "morning", "noon", "afternoon", "evening", and "night", without the "good" out in front, or just elide it to a mere trace of a "g'", likewise with the final consonant, which is barely there:
morning
evenin'
g'ni(t)
etc.
I think that is fairly common with many people I know.
I wonder how it plays out in other languages.
Russian: "g(ood) day" (dobryy) den' (добрый) день ??
Chinese: zǎo ān 早安 (lit., "early peace", i.e., "good morning"), but this is customarily reduced to just "zǎo 早", without the "peace", which is analogous to the "good" in the English expressions.
Chester Draws said,
July 17, 2024 @ 3:26 pm
and the obsolescent "Good day"
"Good day" is obsolescent, but in NZ the contraction "Gidday" most certainly is not.
Australia too, I believe.
Victor Mair said,
July 17, 2024 @ 3:31 pm
@J.W.,
Thank you so much for commenting on Paul Harvey. His delivery was inimitable, especially the "Good Day", with rising intonation and unique cadence at the end of his news segment, but many of my friends and I jocularly tried to imitate him nonetheless and would laugh ourselves silly doing so.
When I got out of the Peace Corps (1965-67), which was like living in the thirteenth century, one of the first things I wanted to do was hear Paul Harvey's radio show — just 15 minutes. I would be glued to my precious wooden console radio for that. It had lots of glowing tubes inside and excellent speakers, so I could hear all the mellifluous nuances of Paul Harvey's golden voice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Harvey
Benjamin E. Orsatti said,
July 17, 2024 @ 5:16 pm
Ah, so according to Y and Prof.Mair, the diurnal designation does denote something of meaning. So, when I say “good morning” to my wife, with all the attendant associations of “morning” cited above, is there “more” there, semantically, pragmatically, what have you, than quand Pierre souhait son épouse, «bonjour»? This question is specifically directed to Prof Sapir and Prof. Whorf.
John Swindle said,
July 17, 2024 @ 7:13 pm
In English and German we don't have a way to say "Good night" unless it's in parting or we or our interlocutor or both are off to bed. "Good evening" is as close as we can come.
Julian said,
July 17, 2024 @ 7:21 pm
@Hans Adler
The Easy German podcast has an amusing riff on Mahlzeit here at 1:37:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bXX1IOo4Eg
Cheers.
Fernando said,
July 17, 2024 @ 7:46 pm
If you say “bom dia” to someone in Brazil and it is afternoon, you’re likely to be corrected with a “boa tarde” response. So “dia”, whilenit means “day”, is functionally “morning” in this context. The trio is “bom dia”, “boa tarde” and “boa noite”.
DaveK said,
July 17, 2024 @ 11:32 pm
Re the obsolescence of “good day” . It’s pretty well dead in US English as a greeting but it’s still thriving as a farewell in the phrase “have a good day”.
David Morris said,
July 18, 2024 @ 3:13 am
In Australia it's more often rendered g'day. It is possibly more often said by older men.
Philip Taylor said,
July 18, 2024 @ 3:49 am
The advantage (to my mind) of being able to say "good morning", "good afternoon", "good evening" and "good night" is that one can wish the same person happiness on four separate occasions during the course of a single day, a joy sadly denied to the French for whom a second "Bonjour" within a single day is regarded as a sign of rudeness, the speaker clearly not having been sincere on the first occasion that he used the phrase. [Source : Julie Barlow & Jean-Benoit Nadeau, The Bonjour Effect: The Secret Codes of French Conversation Revealed.]
Vanya said,
July 18, 2024 @ 4:47 am
Romanian is a Romance language spoken by over 20 million people last I checked. "bună dimineața" (literally "good morning") is the standard morning greeting, so clearly "good morning" exists in at least one major Romance language.
Vanya said,
July 18, 2024 @ 4:53 am
Russian: "g(ood) day" (dobryy) den' (добрый) день ??
You cannot get away with that in Russian. However, you certainly can get away with an abbreviated "morgen", "tag" etc. in parts of the German world.
In fact in Hamburg the standard greeting is simply "moin", although I gather there is some dispute as to whether "moin" is really derived from "morgen" or rather Low German "moi", meaning "beautiful". The latter actually seems more likely.
Victor Mair said,
July 18, 2024 @ 5:20 am
I just signed off on a message to someone yesterday evening with "Guten Abend", and it felt all right to me, plus it yielded 32,000,000 ghits.
Victor Mair said,
July 18, 2024 @ 5:32 am
Remember this?
"Have a good / great (rest of [your / the]) day" (2/11/23)
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=57933
It seems to have become standard for many store clerks.
Coby said,
July 18, 2024 @ 8:49 am
French has a simple equivalent of "Have a good / great (rest of [your / the]) day": bonne journée.
Chris Button said,
July 18, 2024 @ 10:14 am
I wonder if the use of "good day" for "good morning" is connected to the use or "morning" to also mean "tomorrow"? Manhã and amanhã in Portuguese, and mañana for both in Spanish.
Cervantes said,
July 18, 2024 @ 1:05 pm
Hey Chris, it seems you missed my earlier comment on this. Yes, because mañana also means tomorrow in Spanish, Buena mañana would be ambiguous. Buenas mañanas could be taken to mean "have a good life," actually, and I can imagine someone saying that.
Robert Coren said,
July 18, 2024 @ 1:20 pm
The last sentence of the OP took me aback, since my recollection is that in my long-ago high-school French class we were explicitly taught not to say "bon matin".
I can't tell from what the native German-speakers say above whether "guten Tag" is restricted to the afternoon. There's some evidence that "good day" was at one time so restricted in English, as in this exchange from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet:
Nurse: God give you good morrow, good gentlemen.
Mercutio: God give you good den, good gentlewoman.
Nurse: Is it good den already?
Mercutio: Ay, for the bawdy hand of the clock is on the very prick of noon.
Robert Coren said,
July 18, 2024 @ 1:22 pm
@Fernando: That corresponds to what we were told by a guide on our recent trip to Portugal. So it's not just Brazil, but Portuguese-speakers in general.
Chris Button said,
July 18, 2024 @ 2:38 pm
I wonder if the use of the plural in Spanish as opposed to the singular in Portuguese originally conveyed more of a sense of wishing someone a good day today and for all the days until they may see you again.
Philip Anderson said,
July 18, 2024 @ 2:59 pm
So the conclusion seems to be that different cultures (even with related languages) divide the daytime* up differently, and that this can change over time. This may be interesting, but it’s hardly surprising, nor is it particularly surprising if neighbouring languages are similar. Haven’t we had a similar discussion regarding the colour spectrum? In both cases, any division is pretty arbitrary.
*English seems unusual in using the same word for daytime (the opposite of night) and a period of 24 hours.
Jonathan Smith said,
July 18, 2024 @ 3:04 pm
Re: the Spanish situation, Tomorrow~morning~daytime overlap experientially such that metonymies in language seem inevitable — I've heard monolingual English-speaking children use "morning" for "daytime" for instance. And note toMORrow ~ MORning.
One would expect this to be all over various languages — one I know is Taiwanese bîn-á-chài 'tomorrow' where superficially the compound suggests rather 'tomorrow morning' (IDK to what degree bîn-á-ji̍t, more literally 'tomorrow', is still in use.) And this is not even getting into the more obscure etymology of the first syllable; here there is a relationship at some level to e.g. Mand. míngtiān 'tomorrow' where the initial reference could itself easily have been to morning or daytime…
Re: Fernando's comment, a Chinese teacher in Beijing had a story about being told off in Mexico for using "buenos días" after noon by like 5 minutes… this sticklerism (whether individual or cultural) clearly annoyed him even decades later :D
Norman Smith said,
July 18, 2024 @ 8:47 pm
"G'day", or "g'day g'day" is pretty common in the Ottawa Valley in Ontario, and I'd expect to hear it in Newfoundland as well. These are both places with à fair amount of Irish influence on the local accent.
Meerhörnchen said,
July 19, 2024 @ 9:22 am
> *English seems unusual in using the same word for daytime (the opposite of night) and a period of 24 hours.
In my experience, most languages seem to use the word for 'day' to also mean 'nychthemeron', even languages like Scandinavian and Finnish that, unlike English, have a separate word for 'nychthemeron' in common use. Do you have any languages in mind that don't?
Philip Anderson said,
July 19, 2024 @ 12:48 pm
Maybe not so unusual, but I was thinking of Welsh, with dydd (~nos) and diwrnod, and French with journée and jour.
RfP said,
July 20, 2024 @ 2:13 am
And then there’s “Have a good one,” which is quite common in less formal shopping situations in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Nat J said,
July 20, 2024 @ 7:42 pm
Does the hostility or sarcasm implicit in contemporary AmEng “Good day!” stem solely from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, or does it predate the film-quote?
Gokul Madhavan said,
July 21, 2024 @ 3:48 am
To me, no discussion of the phrase “good morning” is complete without a reference to the conversation between Bilbo Baggins and Gandalf that takes place at the beginning of The Hobbit:
(Source: Goodreads)
Gokul Madhavan said,
July 21, 2024 @ 7:24 am
As for the Indosphere, temporally scoped greetings like “good morning” or “good evening” are quite rare, especially in historical texts. (They are much more common now, but almost always in English even if the conversation is happening in an Indian language, which I take to be indicative of the source of the practice.) You’re much more likely to use the standard greetings like namaste, namaskār(a(m)), or vaṇakkam (Tamil), which are applicable at any time of the day.
In Sanskrit, the phrase “good morning” can be literally translated as su-prabhātam, but to my knowledge it was never historically used as a salutation. (It does get used in contemporary spoken Sanskrit, but I suspect that’s a calque of the English phrase.) Instead, the word su-prabhātam refers to a class of Hindu hymns dedicated to waking up temple deities in the morning. The paradigmatic example of such a hymn is the Śrī Veṅkaṭeśa Suprabhātam dedicated to Lord Veṅkaṭeśvara of the famous Tirupati shrine. (There are multiple examples of hymns in this genre in Tamil that are hundreds of years older.)
David Marjanović said,
July 21, 2024 @ 9:31 am
In German the morning is divided into Morgen or Früh (around sunrise or waking up or whatever – certainly before 10 am) and Vormittag (the rest, until noon sharp). Guten Tag is used in the Vormittag and the Nachmittag (literally "afternoon", till 5 or 6 pm; 6 pm is traditional suppertime).
Mahlzeit is short for Gesegnete Mahlzeit "[have a] blessed meal"; reportedly, the first word survives in Switzerland instead of the second. Its use as a general noontime greeting varies a lot in space and time. There's also a sarcastic use: na, Mahlzeit "oh, great".
That's what rebonjour is for. It's commonly used in even formal e-mails.
It's a greeting, not a sign-off.
David Marjanović said,
July 21, 2024 @ 9:36 am
I forgot: Morgen, Tag, Abend and as mentioned Mahlzeit are common as truncated greetings in the regions that have the longer forms in the first place, Mahlzeit even outside (the full gesegnete Mahlzeit is definitely very rare nowadays); and moin(-moin)! definitely started as Low German moien Dag "[I wish you a] beautiful day", though it has spread and is used by lots of people who don't know this.
The price of not marking the accusative on adjectives or nouns.
Philip Anderson said,
July 21, 2024 @ 10:07 am
@ Gokul Madhavan
Thank you for posting The Hobbit quote: it did need saying.
Rodger C said,
July 21, 2024 @ 12:02 pm
The price of not marking the accusative on adjectives or nouns.
Now we know one more way the Common Speech was like English.
Robert Coren said,
July 22, 2024 @ 9:54 am
@David Marjanović: I never knew about that distinction between Morgen and Vormittag.
@Rodger C: It's not entirely clear (to me, at least) that the concept of the Common Speech as a separate language of which English was only a representation applies to The Hobbit.
Rodger C said,
July 22, 2024 @ 11:27 am
Robert Coren: True, Tolkien only started regarding The Hobbit as an actual part of his worldbuildng after it was published. But if any of his correspondents in the post-LOTR years had confronted him with this question, I bet that's what he would have told them.
/df said,
August 2, 2024 @ 5:02 am
@Vanya: Hamburg is not so far from Copenhagen, where I found that Danes greeted each other with what sounded to me like "mohrn". I assumed this was a typically elided version of "godmorgen", just as British office workers say just "morning", or "morning all".